IT’S time for Renée Zellweger to stock up on doughnuts and cheese pizzas again: Bridget Jones is back.
Just a day after Helen Fielding confirmed the title of the third installment of her book series, Mad About the Boy, I can reveal that British production company Working Title have acquired the rights to the film for £3million.
Which means Renée, 44, is going to have to put on another 30 lbs if she wants to accurately portray porky Bridget again.
The actress famously gorged on her favourite fatty foods for the first film in 2001, which she received an Oscar nomination for, but hired a nutritionist to help her gain the weight more stably for the sequel in 2004.
Rumours suggest that she and her main co-stars Colin Firth and Hugh Grant are all signed up to take part in Mad About the Boy.
In the new book, Bridget will be “immersed in texting and experimenting with social media”. And basically learning that it is never OK to text while drunk.
The script for the third Bridget Jones instalment is still being written, its producer has said.
But Tim Bevan, the co-chairman of Working Title Films, said the movie, Bridget Jones's Baby, was beginning to take shape.
"The script is being written. Bridget Jones's Baby is like herding cats, but they're beginning to fall into line," he said, reported Radio 1 Newsbeat online, confirming that the cast had been approached about the third film.
The last Bridget Jones film, The Edge Of Reason, came out in 2004, with Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant reprising their roles.
Hugh feels he is ''to blame'' for his typecasting as a bumbling English gentleman because the success of 1994's 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' made him feel that was what people wanted to see from him.
He told Total Film magazine: ''Typecasting is partly my fault. I signed up to a few films before 'Four Weddings', two or three of which had diffident Englishmen parts and I didn't sign out of doing those films after I became successful.
"So it's partly to my credit, fulfilling my obligations, but it's also to my discredit that my sudden success with 'four Weddings' made me think, 'Oh everyone likes me being that bumbly person' and that bled into my real life.
''I look back at some of the interviews I did in America in those years and I wince. I think, 'What the (expletive) were you doing that for you (expletive)?'
''So it's likely that I'm to blame for some of the deep rut of typecasting I fell into at that point.''
Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy, played by Renee Zellweger and Colin Firth.
The world's most popular "chubby" single girl with "enormous panties" is making a comeback.
Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy are set to return to the big screen for the third instalment of the film franchise of Helen Fielding's popular '90s newspaper column turned best-selling book series.
According to reports in the UK, the film will be released in late 2012 and will be titled Bridget Jones' Baby.
Colin Firth, who plays the reindeer loving Mark Darcy said in a recent interview with CNN there is a script and he is looking forward to the cast reunion.
"This character has obviously inhabited part of my life and it does look as if it's going somewhere."
No details about the script have been released however in Fielding's final column in The Independent newspaper in 2006 she wrote of falling pregnant to Hugh Grant's lothario character Daniel Cleaver.
According to the Metro newspaper, Bridesmaids director Paul Feig was originally earmarked to sit in the director's chair for the British romantic comedy but The Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo will spearhead the new project to begin filming in early 2012.
The third film will mark the return of the carbohydrate-consuming, weight conscious, chain-smoking Bridget played by a bloated Renee Zellweger as she navigates an awkward love triangle between Cleaver, her ex-lover playboy and the stuffy Mr Darcy.
The last time audiences heard from Bridget was in 2004 in The Edge of Reason, the critically panned sequel to the original box office hit Bridget Jones' Diary.
Mr Darcy had proposed and she caught the bouquet at her parent's vow renewal ceremony.
Earlier this year pop singer Lily Allen told Elle magazine she was working on a musical score believed to be for the upcoming show Bridget Jones: The Musical which will open on London's West End in 2012.
Follow Jenna Clarke on Twitter 
Like